​UK continues mass experiment in human despair

John Wight has written for newspapers and websites across the world, including the Independent, Morning Star, Huffington Post, Counterpunch, London Progressive Journal, and Foreign Policy Journal. He is also a regular commentator on RT and BBC Radio. John is currently working on a book exploring the role of the West in the Arab Spring.
You can follow him on Twitter @JohnWight1

Prior to delivering his 2014 budget to the country via the
chancellor’s annual budget speech to parliament earlier this
week, Osborne waited patiently while the prime minister and the
leader of the opposition entered into the ritual pre-budget
speech exchange.

Tributes were paid by both men to former Labour MP and government
minister, Tony Benn. Benn, it should be noted, was the most hated
man in Britain at one time, reviled by the Tories, the British
establishment, and the leadership of his own party. The tributes
that have been paid to him in response to his recent death would
suggest that the political class in Britain is either suffering
collective memory loss or is riddled with rank hypocrisy.

This pre-budget speech exchange then moved onto recent events in
Crimea. Ed Miliband assured the prime minister that he will have
Labour’s support for the toughest possible action against Russia
over the decision by the Crimean people to secede from Ukraine
and apply to join the Russian Federation, asking Cameron if he
favors suspending Russia from the G8. The prime minister assured
the Labour leader and the House that he will discuss it with
Britain’s allies, but that they should consider banning Russia
from the G8 permanently as punishment for its role in the Crimean
events.

The House cheered its approval and you knew by now that you were
bearing witness to a political class in Britain that exists in a
parallel universe.

Next up was Chancellor George Osborne to outline the government’s
budget for 2014-15. It only took him a couple of minutes to
confirm that the mass experiment in human despair which the
Tory-led coalition government describes as an economic policy is
set to continue.

Osborne began his speech with the boast that “If you are a
maker, a doer or a saver, this is a budget for you.” He then
went on to regale the House with various statistics to support
the government’s assertion that Britain’s economic recovery is
headed in the right direction as a result of the austerity
measures they have implemented since coming to office in 2010.
The chancellor then confirmed that cuts to public spending will
continue.

Food banks don’t lie. Their proliferation over the term of the
current government confirmation that Britain in 2014 is a nation
in which poverty, destitution, and the inevitable despair which
follows on from those maladies is worse than at any time since
the Second World War.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the social spectrum, recent
figures released by the charity Oxfam reveal that the five
richest families in Britain share more wealth between them than
the poorest 20 percent of the population – around 12.6 million
people.

Never mind taking a penny off a pint of beer, as the chancellor
announced in his budget speech, the sheer extent of inequality in
Britain in the 21st century is a travesty, the fruits of three
decades of neoliberal orthodoxy that shows no sign of abating
even in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s.

The response of the government – whose front bench consists
predominately of millionaires educated at Eton and other elite
schools in England – to the recession has been to wage an all-out
assault against the poor, especially the unemployed, who have
seen savage cuts to their benefits in addition to a tightening of
the conditions attached to their provision.

In a classic example of divide et impera – divide and rule – the
government has succeeded in turning the low waged against the
unwaged, the able bodied against the disabled, and everybody
against immigrants. Meanwhile, the City of London has felt no
pain and continues to reward itself with outlandish bonuses,
despite its responsibility for the financial crash which caused
the economic crisis, a consequence of the greed and recklessness
that has and continues to underpin its drive for short term
profit at the expense of long term stability and sustainability.

The chancellor’s announcement that growth is expected to
outperform previous expectations – moving from 2.4 percent to 2.7
percent - tells us little apart from the fact that international
demand for high-end London properties remains buoyant and that
the City of London remains one of the world’s premier financial
hubs, attractive to investors seeking a regulation and
tax-friendly environment in which to do business.

The housing crisis that has bedeviled the country for decades,
and which successive governments have failed to tackle, has led
to an ever-burgeoning housing benefit bill as private landlords
have cashed in at taxpayers’ expense. Placing a cap on housing
benefit rather than on the amount of rent landlords can charge
tells us whose side the present government is on.

One of the main planks of this government’s economic strategy has
been to keep interest rates down, benefitting borrowers,
especially homeowners with mortgage repayments constituting the
bulk of their monthly outgoings. Suffering in the process has
been the nation’s savers and those dependent on the value of
investments, such as pensioners. Both the aforementioned
demographics are more likely to be Tory voters, which is why they
have been rewarded by Osborne with measures designed to increase
the threshold at which pensions contributions are taxed and make
it easier for savers to move money around without being
penalized.

Lost in this direction of travel in favor of the nation’s savers
is that the British economy is still laboring due to a lack of
spending. What the nation requires are measures designed to put
money in people’s pockets, necessitating more government
investment in order to offset the lack of investment on the part
of the private sector, which continues to sit on a giant cash
surplus. Back in January the government’s own Office for National
Statistics (ONS) put the amount of said surplus at 334 billion
pounds. This is an investment strike by any other name, which the
government is responding to with measure after measure – tax
cuts, tax breaks, subsidies, below-inflation pay rises across the
public sector, thereby acting as a brake on pay in the private
sector - designed to bribe them to end it.

Ultimately, the chancellor’s 2014 budget merely confirms that
Britain is a country where socialism for the rich is being paid
for with austerity for the poor.

Karl Marx, lying in his grave at London’s Highgate Cemetery,
could never have seen that one coming.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.